The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  “Hmm...” Tanis eyed him askance before falling into silence again. Ean could almost perceive the lad’s shifting thoughts altering the patterns of the stars.

  Eventually, Tanis sighed. “I miss Alorin.” He looked back to Ean with a furrow between his brows, looking so much like Arion in the action that it gave Ean a small start, as if seeing a live reflection of his dream-self staring back at him.

  “Learning what I’ve learned about Shadow...it takes imagination to pretend that any of this is real. I can see the allure of the Realms of Light. I understand why the Warlocks are drawn to them so strongly.”

  Ean glanced to him. “Why is that?”

  “Because it’s someone else’s creation.” A lopsided smile flickered across the lad’s face, half wry, half apologetic. “See, you’re always causing your own effects in Shadow. You never get to receive the effect of anything. In the Realms of Light, you’re an effect of someone else’s causation all the time—because none of us made the world or its rules, and that world and those rules act upon us. Gravity, inertia, the night and the day, weather systems—we’re the effect of the world in a million ways.

  “For a Warlock, being in the Realms of Light means being able to receive the effect of the world without knowing all the while in the back of their minds that they’re creating everything and just pretending that they’re not.”

  Ean arched brows. “That’s an interesting look, Tanis.”

  “It’s like Sinárr described to me once. In Shadow, if I summon clothing and want to feel the sensation of its cloth, I have to put the illusion of sensation there to be experienced, pretend I didn’t create that feeling, and then decide to feel it as though I had nothing to do with putting the sensation there to begin with. It’s all rather convoluted.”

  Ean chuckled. “Evidently.”

  “Warlocks trade in admiration, you know.” Tanis darted a sidelong look at him. “It’s their currency. The highest form of admiration is gained in response to aesthetics married with sensation. You probably wouldn’t know it from your experience in Wylde, but they can create miraculous worlds.” He added more thoughtfully, “Mind-blowing worlds.”

  “What I’ve seen of your world is pretty mind-blowing, Tanis.”

  The lad gave him a grateful look. “Sinárr says beauty achieves its highest expression in the perfection of chaos.”

  Ean chuckled. “That’s not in the least abstruse.”

  “Sinárr says Warlocks are always seeking ways to reinvent chaotic beauty.”

  Ean thought about that. “Chaotic beauty...” He sharpened his gaze upon the lad. “But not in Wylde?”

  “I didn’t see all of the worlds of Wylde, but the ones I saw didn’t seem organized around beauty.”

  Ean angled him a look. “For what purpose then?”

  Tanis shook his head, musing on his recollection. “I don’t think the worlds of Wylde were created to garner admiration,” he said after a moment. “They felt more like...an experiment.”

  Ean arched a brow. “Baelfeir’s version of the Realms of Light?”

  Tanis nodded, looking troubled. “Something like that.”

  They emerged from the vastness of space into a world of rolling green hills and blue skies as far as the eye could see. And upon them...

  Ean drew up short. His hand automatically went for a sword that wasn’t at his hip. “Tanis,” he breathed, low with alarm, “are those...”

  Revenants studded the hills. They sat in mushroom clumps, stood grouped in willowy copses, or lay stretched in the grass, docile as a herd of cows.

  Millions of them.

  Wearing a bright smile, Tanis tugged at his arm. “They’re not what they once were. Come and see.” He headed off with brisk confidence.

  For a moment, as Ean watched Tanis striding into the crowd of black-skinned creatures, he couldn’t process the sight, couldn’t comprehend that these quiet entities had once composed the clawing, shrieking, ravenous horde that had pursued him and Darshan through the worlds of Wylde, and who Tanis had saved by transporting them all into one of his own worlds.

  For a moment, as Ean watched his bond-brother and once-son, he felt ineffably proud of him. Tanis carried courage and compassion in equal measure.

  Most of the revenants stood as still as statues, so the field was eerily silent as Ean started after Tanis. Hearing only the whisper of wind in his steps through the grass made the memory of those screaming hours throb all the louder in Ean’s ears.

  He kept seeing himself buried under them, kept feeling the ghostly touch of sucking mouths and clutching fingers in a seething mass, kept struggling to breathe beneath the unending pressure of hundreds of them piled atop his trapped body, horrified, listening to the susurrus shifting of their forms.

  Ean shoved the memory from mind and jogged to catch up. “Tanis...” his inquiry sounded faintly strained, “how have you done this?”

  Tanis stopped face to face with a revenant. The eerie creature stood as still as a mannequin, appearing neither alive nor exactly dead, its black eyes and features seeming both human and alien.

  “That’s because they’re unshaped forms.” Tanis easily caught Ean’s thought. “Here...look.” He placed a hand on the revenant’s shoulder.

  Suddenly Ean was staring at a girl of Nadia’s height and age, with blond hair and a fair complexion. She was wearing a white dress and blinked at Ean with eyes of cornflower blue.

  Even knowing they were in Shadow, where anything was possible, Ean took a startled step backwards.

  Tanis explained, “Revenants, eidola—harvesters, as the Warlocks refer to them—they’re essentially the same forms.” He was still holding the girl’s shoulder, still gazing upon her. “Except that eidola have been invested with intention and purpose.

  “The Warlocks bind energy into form and furnish it with...not life exactly, not as we think of it, but some kind of entity comes into being as the product of their intent. Upon these entities they layer thought—illusion—as I’ve just done. Sometimes they layer other intentions, purposes...determinisms. They create systems of action; they give their worlds the illusion of life. While the illusion persists, these entities continue happily about whatever purpose was given to them.”

  Ean couldn’t stop staring at the revenant girl, seeing her as both marvelous and grotesque, and thinking about all the eidola he’d battled and slain. He shifted his gaze rather forcibly to Tanis. “And when the Warlock tires of that game?”

  Tanis nodded to the truth he implied. “The illusion vanishes. They become what you see here.” He released the girl and his illusion in the same moment. A black-skinned creature stared once again through lidless eyes.

  Tanis turned to face Ean. “Rafael says there are two camps: those Warlocks who efface their creations when they’re done with them, and those who abandon them to fend for themselves. But I don’t think these revenants were made to be living things at all.”

  Ean shook his head. “Then what?”

  Tanis frowned at the revenant. “I think, like the rest of Wylde, they were an experiment. Someone wanted to see what would happen if the entities were given the barest semblance of purpose: survive.”

  Ean stared harder at him. “You think the Warlocks of Wylde were trying to create life like we find in Alorin? Life like us?”

  “I think Baelfeir was experimenting with the idea, yes.”

  “To what end?”

  Tanis swept his hair back from his face and turned a look around the field. “Rafael says that Baelfeir’s games darken the aether, but he won’t say why.”

  Pondering this, Ean gazed across the revenant-studded hills. In a near valley, a large mass of the creatures was swaying gently together as if on a breeze.

  All of the hairs on his arms suddenly stood on end.

  “Why are they so...calm?” Ean couldn’t shed the discomfiting sensation that they were all going to spring to life and start clawing at him.

  Tanis eyed him amusedly. “I created this spac
e with both deyjiin and elae. They’re not hungering anymore.” He pushed hands in his pockets and started off again, weaving among the ebony statues.

  “So...they’re a lifeforce without determinism,” Ean repeated as he followed. “Entities incapable of creating energy the way we can.”

  Tanis angled a look over his shoulder. “You think we create energy?”

  Ean shrugged. “We have lifeforce.”

  “They have lifeforce.” Tanis paused to wait for him and asked as Ean rejoined his side, “How do you think we create energy?”

  “Maybe it’s truer to say we are energy. Elae gives us life.”

  “Warlocks aren’t fueled by elae.”

  “Warlocks create starpoints by which to create energy—deyjiin, elae, it’s still energy.” Ean settled him a pointed look. “And what applies to one applies to all, Tanis. So says the Second Law.”

  Tanis pushed his hair back from his face again and met Ean’s gaze with curiosity evident in his. “But how could we have starpoints and not know it?”

  Ean grunted. “That’s the fifty-talent question, isn’t it?”

  They were strolling past a dozen sleeping revenants who were entwined with each other like siblings when an idea suddenly came to Ean. He lifted his gaze to the millions studding the vast meadow and asked quietly, “What are you going to do with them now?”

  Tanis let out a slow exhale. “I’m not sure.”

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  The lad looked to him, brightening. “I would love to hear it.”

  Ean slid his gaze across the slumbering revenants coiled about each other. Dead things didn’t seek another’s warmth or closeness during the vulnerability of sleep. “I only wonder if...perhaps, what they’re craving isn’t energy but connection?”

  “Connection.” Tanis arched brows as he thought this over. Then his features resolved with understanding. His eyes flew back to Ean’s. “You think we should try to bind them anew, reshape them beneath our own determinism.”

  Ean smiled.

  Tanis barked a laugh. “Sinárr and Rafael will throw conniptions over this.”

  “But will they do it?”

  After a moment’s consideration, Tanis’s colorless eyes assumed a devious twinkle. “I think I might know a way.”

  After Tanis left to propose Ean’s idea to Sinárr, the prince went in search of Darshan and Rafael.

  Warlocks, Ean had discovered, were not easy to pin down. They were accustomed to flicking between their various worlds at the speed of thought. They were not used to having mortals among them, and they were definitely unfamiliar with the concept of compromise.

  But manners were important to them.

  To make their guests feel welcome then, the two Warlocks had agreed to limit their wanderings to a few specific worlds, and they’d strung bridges through their temporarily combined universes to make traversing them easier for the mortals.

  But they didn’t exactly post signs as to which world they would be occupying at any given time.

  Ean used his connection to Darshan as a compass to guide him on the bridge through Rafael’s worlds. He traversed a land comprised of floating mountains, passed an unsettling place where the crimson sky seemed to be perpetually falling, looped around a world of terraced seas, and finally emerged into a starscape of colorful nebulae whose vastness made his head swim. Soon thereafter, he found Rafael’s unmistakable obsidian staircase, which stretched as wide as a river, and headed down it.

  After what felt like a week or so, Ean arrived at a palace of dark glass the size of a small city and beheld...

  He wasn’t exactly sure what Darshan and Rafael were doing.

  In front of him spread an immense lawn formed of what appeared to him as living strands of volcanic glass. Scattered across the lawn were globes of differing variegated colors and sizes, similar to the spherical glass floats of a fisherman’s net. Three-quarters of the way down the lawn, a pearlescent globe glowed like a muted star. The globes were all rotating in a slow, counter-clockwise fashion around the star.

  At the near end of this puzzling scene stood Rafael, with his torso of crackled gold, his hair of raven flames shedding deyjiin embers, and his wings furled in a cloak of misting velvet; and beside him, the tall, darkly-clad form of Darshan, who might’ve been the only immortal in the known who could stand beside Rafael and not appear overmatched.

  Rafael withdrew a brilliant green globe from a large amphora full of the things, took aim with it, and cast it bouncing across the lawn. It rolled within jumping distance of the milky star-globe and stopped in a hovering shimmer, as a piece of iron caught up between two magnets. Rafael turned to Darshan with one raven brow lifted in an I-dare-you-to-do-better arch.

  Darshan gave a dubious grunt.

  He withdrew a luminous blue-green globe from the amphora at his side, took his aim—also towards the glowing white star—and tossed. Ean watched Darshan’s ball go tumbling towards the star. It looked like it was going to arrive even closer than Rafael’s but unexpectedly swerved and crashed into a globe covered in reddish-orange swirls.

  The two globes stuck together, flew into a mad spin and whirled around in an ellipse. Ean stared at them in wonder.

  The immortals watched this interchange for a moment, with Rafael looking humorously puzzled and Darshan rather vexed. Then Rafael sighed. “I think that’s the best we can hope for from those two. Shall I take my turn?”

  Darshan bowed slightly to him. “By all means, Rafael.” He sounded conspicuously polite, but Ean sensed a hint of vexation—unusual in that it was any emotion at all—radiating across their bond.

  The prince settled down on an obsidian bench that was surprisingly comfortable and watched Rafael choose another globe from his amphora. The Warlock selected one that was a luminous blue-white, with an oblong spot of green glowing in its southern hemisphere. Rafael’s fingers vanished into the globe as if sinking through a vaporous outer layer to grasp a solid core. The Warlock took aim and cast the object bouncing across the lawn.

  It bounced...irregularly.

  It looked like it was going to smash into the central white star when it suddenly flew sideways and smashed into a green and yellow globe instead.

  The latter exploded with multiple gaseous geysers and rapidly spun out of control, shedding fiery sparks like a pinwheel across the entire lawn.

  Meanwhile, red spots started blooming all across the blue-white globe, which was hobbling wildly off-balance. The spots quickly spread until smoky red swirls covered the entire surface. Then the whole thing turned ashen and started imploding.

  “Ah...” Rafael extended a hand towards the two globes appreciatively. “Now, that is what is supposed to happen.”

  Darshan observed him stoically, but Ean perceived a remote undertone of frustration. “I do not make planets, Rafael. I consume them.”

  “I offered to help you,” the Warlock reminded him with a taunting smile, “but you knew everything there was to know about planets, did you not say? How many countless thousands have you unmade?”

  “I take your point.”

  Smiling with sublime satisfaction, Rafael chose another globe—a violet one this time—and held it up to Darshan’s inspection. “It requires much less understanding to tear something down than to build it in the first place, Darshanvenkhátraman. ‘Adults make things, children break things,’ as humanity likes to say.” He made the globe hover over the tips of his fingers, revolving slowly, his gaze admiring of its beauty. “Warlocks make things, Malorin’athgul...”

  “Can unmake Warlocks as readily as planets.”

  Rafael laughed, and his darkly flaming hair laughed with him. Ean was debating how quickly he could make it back to the obsidian bridge before Darshan summoned the power of Chaos to wipe Rafael out of existence when the Warlock clapped a hand on the Malorin’athgul’s shoulder. “If it helps you to know, Pelas fared no better the first few times we played.”

  Darshan grunted.


  Ean looked to the lawn and its glowing globe ornaments and scrubbed at his head. “Is it possible you two are playing lawn bowling...” he couldn’t keep the perplexity out of his tone, “with planets?”

  “But of course.” Rafael gave Ean a smile that hovered between dangerous and disarming. “How do you play it?”

  Rafael’s flaming hair stilled, as if keen to hear Ean’s answer.

  “You know,” Ean made a round shape with his hands, “with balls?”

  “Balls.” Rafael’s hair looked supremely disappointed. “How underwhelming. No wonder you live such short lives. One must hope one is reborn into a more entertaining century.”

  Darshan upended his amphora, and dozens of planets bounced out—well, bounced if Ean thought of the term loosely. The globes exhibited odd gravitational attraction and repulsion and sometimes magnetized to each other for a moment, only to then zip away and magnetize to a different globe.

  The Malorin’athgul sighed as he watched them pinging back and forth. “I must remake most of these.”

  A swirling emerald-gold planet rolled to a stop against Ean’s boot. He picked it up. It was surprisingly warm. And heavy. “This one is pretty.”

  Darshan’s expression hinted of a minute frown. “They do not have the correct universal gravitation.”

  Rafael waved an airy hand. “They’re planets. Sometimes they do what you want, sometimes they don’t. Makes the game more interesting that way.”

  Ean held the globe with both hands. “Who decides if the planets do what you want?”

  Rafael turned him a smile. “You do, of course.”

  “I do not recall deciding that,” Darshan said.

  Rafael’s dark eyes sparkled. “Well, obviously.”

  While the two immortals discussed gravitational forces affecting planetary rotation, Ean studied Rafael.

  He hadn’t yet decided what to make of the Warlock. Rafael was handsome and charismatic, in a predatory sort of way, and he oozed sensuality indiscriminate of gender, which Ean found...interesting. In his understanding, Warlocks were inherently sexless—despite their propensity to manifest as males. But without gender, how did they procreate? For that matter, did they have any innate form at all?